The present invention relates to disk image streaming, and more specifically, to providing commands to indicate unused disk blocks (such as TRIM and UNMAP commands) to identify redundant data for disk image streaming efficiency.
With the increased virtualization of computers, users typically expect their data to be accessible from all over the world. In addition to simply storing a user's data, the contemporary art can store an entire desktop disk image, including an operating system, applications and application data, in a server and synchronize the image as necessary with locally available storage. In the contemporary art, the complete disk image is typically copied or streamed from one computer to another. Although contemporary disk images have the size of an entire hard disk, only a small part of the entire disk image is actively used by the operating system. A majority of the disk image is typically unallocated or unused disk space.